ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Digital entities are compelled to cope with a relentless and growing number of subscribers as well as their expectations of performance and digital user experience . This pressure is translated towards global , national , and regional services providers , which results in further investments and demand from datacentres and network fabrics .
Another driver of energy consumption inside datacentres is the nature of business applications and workloads running . Artificial
Servers are in vertical racks and the dielectric coolant circulates inside and around the immersed equipment .
intelligence , machine language , data lakes , predictive analytics , and digital twins require high density compute infrastructure , which translates into higher energy consumption per sqm . Cryptomining for example requires CPUs that consume 300Kw to 600Kw , while the servers that support ChatGPT requires between 1.1M and 23M Kwh per month .
Air cooling reaches limit
A useful metric that can be used to compare datacentre energy consumptions is Power Usage Effectiveness or PUE . PUE describes how efficiently a datacentre distributes the consumption of energy to manage its performance and service level agreements . It is the ratio of how much energy is consumed by the total datacentre versus how much energy is consumed by the IT equipment .
If the energy consumption for cooling and operations is only marginally more than the energy consumed by IT infrastructure the ratio will be close to 1.0 . The greater the number from 1.0 , the more energy is being consumed by the external system outside IT infrastructure .
According to trends available with ALEC Data Center Solutions , the energy consumed by datacentres has soared from 0.4Kw per sqm in 2000 and before to 11Kw per sqm in 2020 . This is expected to reach 22Kw per sqm in 2025 .
The architecture of cooling systems used by datacentres has had to change from floor mount with cooling , to inter-rack cooling , closed loop cooling , rear door cooling , to finally direct to chip cooling . This continuous demand to maintain ambient temperatures inside the datacentre has led to liquid immersion cooling .
Air cooling systems can support datacentres up to 2U servers that consume 300W . Beyond that datacentres need to start considering liquid cooled and immersive cooling systems . The cut-off limit for air cooled high density servers that use CPUs and GPUs is 300W .
Liquid immersive cooling
Liquid immersion cooling , or more specifically single-phase liquid immersion cooling , is a method of fully submerging heat generating computer components as well complete servers into a dielectric fluid . “ This is not to be confused with water ,” says Viedge .
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